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KU quarterback Heaps still driven to be best

Once ranked as the top quarterback prospect in the country, Jake Heaps will make his first start for Kansas on Saturday when the Jayhawks play host to South Dakota.

LAWRENCE — The dream starts with a 7-year-old throwing a football while groups of parents watch on a grassy hill.

Steve and Kelly Heaps have slightly different recollections of this day, which might reveal something about their personalities. As Kelly gives the play-by-play, you can almost see it: the sun-splashed field, kids in floppy shoulder pads and helmets, minivans lining the parking lot. Little Jake takes the snap. He bounces on his toes and nods to his receiver. The ball sails from his hand in a perfect spiral, whistling through the air like it was dropped from heaven. Parents gasp in awe. The other 7-year-olds stop in their tracks.

“In that moment, I just knew,” Kelly said. “I knew he was destined to be a quarterback.”

Steve, who was stuck at work and didn’t see the Pass of Destiny, remembers only that Jake didn’t play quarterback that season. The coach’s son already had dibs, so Jake played the offensive line instead.

“Not too many people know about that,” Steve said. “The offensive line is a big part of the team, even though it doesn’t get talked about a lot.”

As destinies converged, Jake’s future came into focus. He would be a quarterback, but not just an average one. His mission was to be the best: the best on his team, the best in Seattle, the best on the West Coast, the best in the whole country.

To get there, Jake and his parents would spend countless hours in the car, driving from one football camp to the next and learning from the best quarterback gurus. While other kids were goofing around with their friends, Jake was immersed in his craft.

“He wanted to be the best,” Steve said, “so we had to provide an opportunity for him to go to camps and see what the competition was like.”

The investment paid off in 2010, when Jake was ranked as the No. 1 quarterback in his class by Rivals.com. He was in the midst of a string of three consecutive state titles at Seattle’s Skyline High, and scholarship offers were pouring in from some of the top college programs in the country.

The whole thing was pretty surreal, Kelly said, but it reminded her of what she’d told her husband after coming home from that football practice years before.

“I said, ‘Mark my words: From this day forward, I think this kid is supposed to be a quarterback,’ ” she said.

* * * * *

It’s game week, and Jake Heaps is talking about his routine.

Heaps admits to being superstitious, so he will follow a strict ritual before taking the field Saturday for his first start at Kansas.

“Everything has to be done a certain way, from the way I put on my pants to the exact order of the songs I listen to,” Heaps said. “I’m always making sure those things are right and on point.”

Heaps is the starting quarterback of a major-conference football program, a player surrounded by hype and high expectations, and in a way this is exactly what his family envisioned when they were driving from Seattle to Portland every weekend for quarterback camps, eating Subway sandwiches and listening to books on tape.

In another way, it’s nothing like they imagined.

When Jake started the football grind — 15 or 20 weekends a year in Portland after the high school season, plus other football camps around the country — the goal was just to get a scholarship. Wouldn’t it be cool, Kelly thought, if Jake could play college football and never have to worry about tuition?

The whole family was invested in this future, but only because it was what Jake wanted, Kelly said.

“If he wanted to be a kite flyer, I would have helped him find the best kite and taken him to kite shows, I guess,” she said. “That was Jake’s dream, and we tried to help him fulfill it.”

Being a football prodigy has its price. Sometimes Jake would leave a camp in tears after being challenged by a coach, and Steve would remind him why they were doing this.

“We said to him in the car, ‘Hey, if you don’t want to do this anymore, then you don’t have to come down here anymore. We won’t do this. But you said that you wanted to be the best, and there are sacrifices that have to be made,’ ” Steve said.

Even in the tough moments, Jake said, there was never a time when he wanted to quit.

“I was very self-motivated,” he said, “and everything I did, I did because I wanted to.”

The sacrifice paid off in the form of scholarship offers from powerhouse programs like USC, LSU and Notre Dame, then coached by Charlie Weis. Steve remembers being in awe when Lane Kiffin, then the coach at Tennessee, brought Jake into the middle of an empty Neyland Stadium during a recruiting trip to Knoxville.

“You feel like you’re a gladiator in there because the seats are right on top of you," he said. "They turned the lights on just for him. It was like, ‘Wow, how could you get any better than this?’ ”

Jake wanted to commit to Tennessee on the spot, but the family had a rule: If Jake still liked the school two weeks after his visit, he could keep it on the list.

As the recruiting process progressed, two main contenders emerged. One was the University of Washington, Jake’s hometown school. The other was Brigham Young, the school affiliated with his Mormon faith.

“We really all thought that he would have been a U-Dub Husky,” Kelly said. “We were Husky fans for our whole lives, all of us.”

Washington was coming off an 0-12 season, though, and had just fired coach Ty Willingham. The new coach, Steve Sarkisian, had come from USC and, according to Steve Heaps, had a preference for players from California. Plus, Jake had built a strong relationship with Brandon Doman, the quarterbacks coach from BYU who would call him religiously every Wednesday night.

The summer before his senior year of high school, Jake called Doman and delivered the news. He was committing to BYU, and he was bringing two other LDS players with him.

“He grew up a Huskies fan his whole life there in Seattle and was destined — predestined, however you want to say it — to go to Washington,” Doman said. “But the recruiting process is such a unique process. It’s all about relationships.”

Heaps announced his commitment in front of a crowd at Iggy’s Sports Grill in Salt Lake City, joined by wide receiver Ross Apo and linebacker Zac Stout. He said the goal was to generate attention for BYU and not himself, but the spectacle might have been the first signal of the tough transition ahead.

“He’d kind of prepared this big announcement day,” Doman said. “I don’t know if I’m a big fan of those or not, but that’s what they had done to make a big splash for BYU that he was committing.”

Regardless of the particulars, Doman was thrilled to get a commitment from a quarterback with Heaps’ abilities.

“He had a really uncanny ability to throw the football,” Doman said. “He’s not a real big guy, but for his size, he delivered an outstanding football.”

* * * * *

If you’ve never been to Provo, Doman said, there are a few things you should know about what it means to be a BYU quarterback. You’re following the lineage of Jim McMahon, Steve Young and Ty Detmer, and it’s not a job to be taken lightly.

“I don’t know what it’s like at Kansas, but man, at BYU, it’s all about the quarterback,” Doman said. “We don’t have other sports around here. We have the Utah Jazz, but the BYU quarterback might as well be the governor of the state.”

In hindsight, Doman said, Heaps might not have been prepared for that responsibility as a freshman. But the Cougars wanted to get their top recruit on the field, so they devised a two-quarterback system with Heaps and sophomore Riley Nelson. Using both quarterbacks in their season opener, the Cougars beat Washington 23-17.

“It was a unique dynamic and it worked well, but it’s not a good format,” Doman said. “It’s not a good way to do things. We, in hindsight, probably should not have done that, but that’s how it panned out.”

The quarterbacks rotated until Nelson underwent season-ending shoulder surgery after BYU’s third game, a 34-10 loss to Florida State. The Cougars lost their next two games to fall to 1-4, then won five of six with Heaps at the helm to earn a bid to the New Mexico Bowl. Heaps threw four touchdowns and was named MVP of the bowl victory against UTEP, capping a freshman season in which he threw for 2,316 yards and 15 touchdowns.

Heaps set every freshman passing record at BYU, but the bitter quarterback battle had taken a toll.

“My freshman year there was a lot going on,” Heaps said. “There were a lot of battles. There was a divided locker room. At that point, I was just trying to battle through that. It was tough on me, because I’d never been in a situation like that.”

Jake's situation was hard on Steve and Kelly, too. Jake lived off-campus with his sister and brother-in-law when he arrived at the school, but after a few months, his parents decided to join him in Provo. Steve maintained his home-building business in Seattle, flying back and forth for Jake’s games on weekends.

“It was difficult to do that, but I went to all the games and was able to see him,” Steve said. “That was a lot.”

Steve and Kelly wanted to be closer to Jake, but they also wanted to keep their distance, Kelly said. Jake had a new wife to think about — Brooke, whom he married in June 2011 — and Kelly said she never wanted to interfere with her son’s football career.

“We’ve always stayed out of the coaches’ offices,” she said. “We’re not those kind of parents. When things are hard, some parents come in and throw fits. We let Jake handle his business and do his thing.

“But as a parent sitting in the stands, he had such a nice freshman campaign. Things were going well. It looked like he had a good launch into his sophomore season.”

Heaps entered that season as the incumbent starter, but the locker room rift still hadn't healed, Doman said. After experiencing nothing but success during his high school career, Heaps wasn’t equipped to lead a team through that kind of adversity.

“You’ve got a handful of guys that are Jake Heaps fans and a handful of guys that are Riley Nelson fans,” Doman said. “As soon as one of them does well or fails, the other group rallies. We had a divided locker room.

“(Heaps) just wasn’t quite ready to handle that. You combine everything together, and the team just started rallying around the older kid because he just was more stable.”

Doman, who was promoted to offensive coordinator before Jake’s sophomore season, wanted to run a more wide-open offense that would utilize Heaps’ ability as a passer. That offense sputtered early in the season, though, as BYU lost 17-16 at Texas and 54-10 against Utah to fall to 1-2.

Nelson replaced Heaps midway through BYU’s fifth game and orchestrated a comeback against Utah State, cementing his place as the Cougars’ starter. Heaps appeared in three more games when Nelson was injured, but two days after the regular season ended, BYU announced he was transferring.

“I wasn’t really thinking about leaving until things happened during the season,” Heaps said. “There were always things that were going on behind the scenes that made it difficult.”

At some point, friends say, the pressure on Heaps — to be the BYU quarterback, to live up to his reputation, to fulfill his family’s dream — became overwhelming. When your whole life is built around being the best, what happens when one day you aren’t?

For Jake and his family, that was a difficult question.

“There were a lot of dynamics for Jake Heaps that maybe he wasn’t quite ready to deal with,” one friend said, “maybe all of them weren’t quite ready to deal with.”

* * * * *

The second time around, Heaps picked his school with little fanfare. Steve found out with a phone call after the fact.

“We didn’t really talk a whole lot about what he was going to do,” he said. “He kind of just made a decision.

“When he decided to go to Kansas, he called and said, ‘Hey Dad, I’m going to go to Kansas.’ I said, ‘OK, great. Why Kansas?’ ”

The explanation was Weis — the coach who had recruited Heaps to Notre Dame three years earlier — and the chance to step in immediately at KU. When your son has his mind made up, who can argue?

Life is different now for the Heaps family. Steve and Kelly, divorced more than a year now, are no longer in contact with each other, though Kelly said she and Jake are in a good place.

“Your kids do a natural growing-up process,” said Kelly, who remains in the Provo area. “Even though our family has always been close, and even though we were here with Jake in Utah, Jake did his own thing. It’s not like he texted me every day telling me what he was doing. It’s not like that. You’ve got to give him his space.

“He’s a married guy now. Yes, we’re close and, yes, we communicate. He’s got a lot going on. He goes to school. He’s getting his football going. I think he’s in his natural progression of life.”

For Jake and Brooke, the fresh start in Lawrence has been a healthy thing.

“We’ve really grown close together in all sorts of different ways,” Jake said. “This whole experience at Kansas has been a positive one from the moment I stepped foot on campus.”

Standing in the KU football complex, a few days removed from his first start as a Jayhawk, Heaps is left with one last question. Say he and Brooke have a son, and one day the kid throws a pass that has everyone believing he was born to be a quarterback. What will they do? Will they load up the car and drive him to a camp? Will they show him what it takes to be the best?

“I definitely would,” Heaps said, “if that’s what he wanted to do. In my situation, I was very driven, and I wanted to do all that stuff.